Washington, like many times before, projects its own assumptions onto a political culture it only half understands
It is still far too early to say with confidence when the present phase of the US-Israeli war against Iran will end. Even a deep familiarity with the region does not solve the problem of uncertainty.
Too many decisive variables lie outside any tidy regional model. Decisions in Washington matter. China’s posture matters. The calculations of global financial and political elites matter. The private thresholds of risk among Gulf monarchies matter. No serious analyst can fold all of that into a neat formula. Yet if one looks at the visible trajectory of the last two days, and if no strategic shock overturns the pattern, the most plausible expectation is that this acute phase will continue for roughly another ten days, perhaps somewhat longer. That would be the most disciplined reading of momentum.
What matters first is to reject the lazy language of victory and defeat. Iran has neither won nor lost in any final sense. What we are witnessing is not an isolated war with a clean beginning and a clean end, but another violent chapter in the broader confrontation that entered a new active phase on October 7, 2023. Since then, Israel has tried to suppress Tehran strategically, to push it back, fracture its deterrent, and, if possible, force a historic reversal in the regional balance of power. But that ambition remains unfulfilled. The war continues because the political organism of Iran has proved far more resilient than many in Washington and West Jerusalem expected.
That resilience is regularly misunderstood in the West because Iran is too often read through categories that flatter outside observers rather than explain Iranian reality. Analysts who search only for economics, elite bargains, social frustration, corruption, sanctions fatigue, or technological backwardness are studying the outer skin of the state while missing its inner architecture. Iran is not sustained by ideology alone, nor by economic performance, nor by the self-interest of its elites. At its deepest level, the Islamic Republic rests upon a much older reservoir of legitimacy, memory, ritual, and sacred history. The modern state in Iran draws energy from a civilizational depth that predates the republic itself and, in important ways, even exceeds it.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
